James

LeBron James knows that what's in the best interest of the NBA is usually in his best interest, which probably is why he complied with the league's request to wear a clear mask to protect his broken nose Saturday night rather than the cooler-looking black one he wore Thursday. No need for the Miami Heat forward to thumb his nose at the NBA, which prefers that players wear clear masks and goggles when protecting their faces and eyes. "It's not a league rule, but it's the league's request that you don't wear the black one," James told reporters before a 112-98 victory over the Orlando Magic in Miami on Saturday.

LeBron James thinks pretty highly of himself, and why not? He's arguably the best all-around player in the NBA these days. So it makes sense that at least one of James' teammates would find it necessary to cultivate the NBA star's superstar status by donning the protective mask James has worn in recent games to protect his broken nose. Miami Heat teammate Chris Bosh posted a photo of himself wearing James' mask and a towel cape to Instagram on Thursday alongside the caption, "I'm BATMAN !

James Murphy's post-LCD Soundsystem life has been more befitting a Victorian renaissance man than a former rock star. He's dabbled in outside productions , yes, but he's also perfected his own coffee blend , lobbied for MMA fighting and is now looking to reform one of New York's least sonorous spaces -- the subway turnstiles. "I started noticing that the subway sounds quite brutal," Murphy told the Wall Street Journal in a video clip discussing the potential project . "Given that all that information is already at the turnstile, why don't we just make it a nice sound?

A bellicose anti-war opera, Benjamin Britten's "Billy Budd" is a stifling shipboard drama with only strong male voices, a theater of testosterone. Manhood stands trial. In 1951, the year of its premiere, "Billy Budd" bravely evoked homoeroticism on the British lyric stage when homosexuality was outlawed. Britten further bravely insinuated disapproval of the military code when his country was recovering from World War II. Praise comes easily to "Billy Budd. " It is consummate music theater.

James Cahill, an art historian and curator who played an influential role in expanding the study and teaching of Chinese painting in the West before and after the opening up of U.S.-China relations in the early 1970s, died Feb. 14 at his home in Berkeley. He was 87. The cause was complications of prostate cancer, said his daughter, Sarah Cahill . A longtime professor at UC Berkeley, Cahill was a dominant scholar in his field for 50 years. In the late 1950s, he was one of a small number of Western scholars permitted access to the imperial paintings that had been evacuated to Taiwan before the Chinese mainland fell under Communist rule.

University of Mississippi police are pushing for criminal charges to be filed against three 19-year-old male freshmen suspected of placing a noose and a flag with a Confederate battle emblem on the campus statue of civil rights icon James Meredith. The students declined through their attorneys to be questioned by university police about the Sunday morning incident, which the school has described as vandalism on the bronze statue of Ole Miss' first African American student. Campus Police Chief Calvin Sellers said in a statement Friday that he and the university's lawyer believed that “sufficient evidence exists to bring criminal charges against the suspects,” and pledged to help state and federal authorities in the investigation.

This week, novelist James Patterson started doing something many an author has secretly dreamed of doing: he's giving back to the bookstores that made it possible for him to be an author in the first place. Making good on a promise he made last fall to give $1 million to independent bookstores, Patterson announced Wednesday that he's sent out the first batch of the checks. Fifty-five bookstores across the United States will receive grants totaling $267,000. “Every day, booksellers are out there saving our country's literature,” Patterson said in a news release.

It was only a matter of time before James Franco, the actor, writer and director who can sometimes treat his career as an ongoing performance piece, weighed in on the recent antics of Shia LaBeouf , who has recently taken a page out of Franco's playbook with a number of spectacles-cum-art-displays. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times published on the paper's website Wednesday, Franco expresses concern for and support of the 27-year-actor, writing : "Though the wisdom of some of his actions may seem questionable, as an actor and artist I'm inclined to take an empathetic view of his conduct.

James C. Dowdle Executive helped expand Tribune's TV, Internet operations James C. Dowdle, 79, an executive who played a key role in the transformation of Tribune Co. into a major media conglomerate, died Monday of congestive heart failure at his home in Wilmette, Ill., his family said. When Dowdle joined the company in 1981, Tribune was focused, as it had been for more than a century, on its newspaper holdings, particularly its flagship Chicago Tribune. By the time Dowdle retired nearly 19 years later as the company's second-ranking executive, Tribune owned 18 television stations, reached more than 75% of U.S. households, held a minority share in the WB network and was also aggressively involved in nearly every aspect of the information industry, including cable television, the Internet and new media.

James Meredith, a civil rights icon whose enrollment at the University of Mississippi broke a racial barrier in 1962, has one thing to say to the vandals who desecrated his campus statue by putting a noose around its neck and draping it with a controversial flag. "That just clearly shows that we're not training our children like the Bible says," Meredith, 80, told the Los Angeles Times from his Mississippi home Tuesday. "They don't know right and wrong, good and bad and how to apply it to life.